District 120 candidate Sterling owes creditors more than $190,000

Statehouse candidate Laura Sterling owes more than $190,000 from mortgage foreclosures and credit card balances, court documents show. But the political newcomer insists her financial troubles put her in sync with voters still struggling with the fallout from the housing bust.

Sterling, one of three Republican candidates vying for the new District 120 seat covering most of Bluffton, owes $63,000 to Bank of America and a subsidiary in credit card debt as well as $130,000 from two foreclosed properties, according to documents from four different suits filed in the Beaufort County Court of Common Pleas in 2010 and 2011.

A judge issued a foreclosure intervention on a third mortgage backed by Fannie Mae, allowing Sterling to negotiate a 40-year, $300,000 loan with a $100,000 balloon payment. She currenty resides at that property.

Sterlings says her family owned four healthy businesses before the start of the Great Recession: Yacht Services, a boat repair company run by her husband; Fast Tax, a tax preparation business owned by her stepfather that she ran herself when his health started failing in 2004; Bottom Line Yacht Company, which offered luxury outings; and The Patio Shop, a high-end outdoor furniture store also owned by her stepfather. Those businesses steadily grew for most of the past decade leading up to the recession, when revenues tanked amid the collective belt tightening that hit high-end businesses especially hard, Sterling said. She said she blames the recession “100 percent” over any potentially questionable business decisions.

“Our revenues started to drop at the beginning of the recession in 2007,” she said. “Established customers started disappearing.”

When The Patio Shop closed its doors in June of 2008 it “brought everything down with it,” Sterling said. Her parents moved into her rental property but soon couldn’t keep up with payments, so she let the mortgage go into default.

With plummeting housing prices there was no way to sell off assets to cushion the struggling businesses, so the rapidly growing credit card balances acted as a life line, Sterling said.

“We were basically trying to save something of what we had,” she said. “We thought if we hung around a little longer things would get getter.”

They didn’t. But Sterling credits these admitted failures with energizing her to run for public office.

“I realized recovery was not happening because we had the wrong leadership and that what the government does matters, because they created a real estate bubble and then everyone went down,” she said.

When asked why she omitted her financial bind from campaign materials if they inspired her political awakening, Sterling said she took the advice of friends who warned against revealing “too much.”

She also brushed aside concerns that revelations of insolvency damage her credibility as a fiscal conservative and business owner, saying the disclosure helps ease “stigma” attached to challenges faced by many in the wake of the recession.

“I would say it’s much more common than we know about, but people won’t talk about it,” she said. “There’s no shame in trying hard to create something, but because of the fear of judgment people won’t talk about it.”

But Sterling may not have enough time before the June 12 primary to construct a counter narrative, and that might not even matter in a low turnout race, said Mark Tompkins, a political science professor at the University of South Carolina.

“The people who are voting are probably more likely to know more about what’s going on, but on the other hand, in these races, almost nobody knows very much,” he said. “The bad news for her is a story like this becomes an important part of the things people do know, and if there isn’t a significant body of knowledge against which this could be countered, it may be a defining story.”

Jerry Stewart, a two-term Beaufort County councilman running against Sterling for the Republican nomination, declined comment. Her other challenger, Beaufort County Council Chairman Weston Newton, did not return phone calls seeking comment.

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